The Innocent Canadian

Now or Never Publishing, April 2026/300 pages

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

March 18, 2026

The Innocent Canadian is John Delacourt’s deftly observed new historical novel, this one set in Britain during the early years of the Second World War.

Part romance, part murder story, part spy thriller, part social satire, and part historical reflection, the book unfolds in wartime London amid the political and moral ambiguities of a society under immense strain of Nazi bombing and the constant threat of invasion.

The novel is inspired by the 30-year affair between Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie and Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen — already immortalized in Victoria Glendinning’s nonfiction Love’s Civil War — but uses that relationship as just one thread of intrigue in a wartime cat’s cradle.

Delacourt places his protagonists, Canadian diplomat Bill Davenant, “awkward and lanky, bespectacled and thoroughly unglamorous”, and his Irish-author lover, Colette Cluny-Wolseley, in the salons, embassies, and intelligence offices of the British capital. Delacourt uses these vantage points to explore the elite culture of wartime Britain and Canada’s evolving place within the emerging Anglo-American alliance.

The novel’s literary lineage is clear. Delacourt’s tone and observational precision recall Ritchie’s diaries, especially The Siren Years – which, after reading it at university, convinced me to join the Foreign Service.

The mood and setting evoke Bowen’s own wartime fiction, notably The Heat of the Day. Like Ritchie and Bowen, Delacourt captures the peculiar psychological landscape of a society living under bombardment yet continuing its rituals of social life, intellectual debate, and romantic intrigue.

The action unfolds during the Blitz, when London endured nightly German air raids. Delacourt emphasizes not only destruction but continuity. Clubs remain open, diplomats gossip, and intelligence officers cultivate contacts in drawing rooms and discreet restaurants.

War, in this portrayal, is conducted not only on battlefields but through conversation and social connection.

The bureaucratic world of intelligence and diplomacy hums with speculation and nervous energy. In one vivid description, in “an office that ran on caffeine, nicotine and anxiety” everyone “from the cleaning staff to the career diplomats would be speculating on the circumstances of every call and the risk involved.”

Within this milieu, Delacourt examines the ideological uncertainty that characterized sections of the British elite in the 1930s and early war years. Fascism and communism alike were debated in aristocratic drawing rooms long before the moral clarity of total war emerged.

The spectre of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley lingers in the background, a reminder that authoritarian politics once had sympathizers among “respectable” society. One character notes that he had been briefed about Mosley and the Blackshirts, before observing that similar currents could be seen across the Atlantic: “the America Firsters, Lindbergh, the Ku Klux Klan” and “the Canadian priest who’d set up shop in Detroit, Father Coughlin.”

In invoking figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin, Delacourt reminds readers that the ideological struggles of the 1930s were international and deeply unsettled.

Communism provokes equally ambivalent responses. Delacourt captures the curious mixture of fear, fascination, and snobbery with which some European elites regarded the Soviet experiment.

The action unfolds during the Blitz, when London endured nightly German air raids. Delacourt emphasizes not only destruction but continuity. Clubs remain open, diplomats gossip, and intelligence officers cultivate contacts in drawing rooms and discreet restaurants.

One character reflects that “the Communists were at root so vulgar,” and that this vulgarity would repel aesthetes more than “the dark seam of cruelty and brutality that ran through Stalin’s patchy fabric of empire building.” The remark exposes the moral evasions and prejudices that shaped the political thinking of the era’s elite.

Running through the novel is a subtle exploration of Canada’s position in the wartime alliance. Delacourt introduces real figures from Canadian diplomacy and intelligence, including the legendary spymaster William Stephenson, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, diplomat and future prime minister Lester B. Pearson, and high commissioner to Britain Vincent Massey, who later became our first Canadian governor general.

Their appearances ground the narrative firmly in the real diplomatic networks linking London, Ottawa, and Washington during the war.

Yet Delacourt avoids romanticizing Canada’s role. Instead, he captures the insecurity and self-consciousness that often marked Canadian diplomacy at the time.

The legacy of the Depression still hangs over the capital; “Ottawa had become introverted and self-involved.” Even the Canadian foreign service is gently mocked, with Pearson complaining about attitudes that were too “goddamned mandarin.” Such moments capture the mixture of ambition and uncertainty that accompanied Canada’s gradual emergence as a more independent diplomatic actor.

The novel’s title reflects its central perspective. Delacourt’s Davenant moves through British elite society as a perceptive outsider. Curious, observant, and underestimated for his intelligence and diplomacy, as one character suggests, he operates merely “in the periphery. The innocent Canadian.”

That apparent innocence becomes an advantage. Free from the ingrained hierarchies of British society, he notices its contradictions more clearly.

Delacourt’s prose is particularly effective in these moments of social observation. His writing combines wit with an anthropological eye for status and behaviour.

Describing the swagger of American officers compared with their Canadian counterparts, he writes that they were “bolder, brawnier and brassier than the Canadian forces, who were like the farm-team version north of the border.”

Elsewhere, he skewers the biological arrogance of elite social circles. In one passage, he observes that “the male with the most charisma, broad chested with a deep, sonorous baritone, would just naturally seek out the woman who embodied the most desirable qualities for mating… They were beautiful Americans, the envy of crumbling Europe and the colonies, not least the English and their hick cousins, the Canadians.”

The language, half-ironic and half-evolutionary, exposes the social Darwinism lurking beneath elite confidence.

Yet beneath the satire lies a more earnest moral thread. Davenant reflects that his primary motivation is simply the desire to see people treated honourably and fairly, even if such impulses seem naïve in a world of intrigue and deception. “It was embarrassingly boy-scoutish but true.”

The line captures the novel’s central tension between cynicism and idealism.

By drawing not only on the relationship between  Ritchie and Bowen, but on their observational and atmospheric descriptions of wartime London, Delacourt has crafted a thoughtful and engaging work of historical fiction.

The Innocent Canadian recreates the mood of life during the Blitz while exploring Canada’s gradual emergence from colonial deference toward a more independent diplomatic identity.

Seen through the eyes of its perceptive outsider, the war becomes not only a military struggle but also a revealing drama of ideas, loyalties, and character.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa and host of the CGAI’s Global Exchange podcast. He is Policy’s principal global affairs book reviewer.